Carolina Miranda

No. No. No. Artist Dustin Yellin announces he has shred $10,000 in cash to create eight paintings, each priced at $10,000. Proceeds will go towards the creation of scholarships for high-school seniors interested in pursuing a career in art. This is such an obvious marketing play. The intended spectacle barely seems visible. [Observer]

Sotheby’s isn’t doing so well. After a year of public battles with activist investor Dan Loeb, the publicly traded auction house admits to spending $21.4 million to cover costs related to the Loeb debacle. [Bloomberg]

Oh, so this is how Reddit plans to make money: reality TV. Along with Wired, the community board will produce the show Cyborg Nation which will focus on real people who use cybernetic devices. [Tube Filter]

Currently tearing up the internet: A woodpecker carrying a weasel on its back. [BBC via: @nutblack1]

Some Sacramento residents are pissed that New York-based Jeff Koons has been commissioned to produce a public artwork rather than a local artist. In response, city spokesperson Linda Tucker told local news station Fox 40 that neither the panel that selected Koons nor the Sacramento Metropolitan Arts Commission “are obligated to review multiple proposals. Their mission is to choose the very best, not discriminate by region.” Doesn’t this sound like a familiar argument? See: “I don’t see race or gender, only quality!” [Artnet News]

The Wu-Tang Clan released a never-to-be-heard-again work of art at PS1 last night. The album’s producer Cilvaringz noted how its inspiration came partially from a night he and RZA spent riding on horseback around the pyramids of Giza. Like all music, it’ll probably get leaked once it’s bought at online auction. [ARTnews]

A tree called Prometheus took root more than 5,000 years ago. It weathered unknown adversity throughout those years, before finally being cut down in 1964 so a scientist could study its rings. Its longevity, no small miracle, was ultimately the cause of its death. In 2011, artist Jeffrey Weiss took up the task of recreating the tree through drawings, digital renderings, and 3D models. This story, which has nothing to do with the market, a mega-gallerist, or collector, graced the front page of the Los Angeles Times this weekend. That’s another miracle, courtesy of Carolina A. Miranda. [The Los Angeles Times]

If you haven’t been to a poetry reading recently, or ever, here’s one you can attend without leaving the Internet. Co-presented by the New Museum and Rhizome, “Poetry as Practice” features six Mondays of poems by Melissa Broder, Tan Lin, as well as someone named ‘not_I.’ [Rhizome]

This link’s for Carolina Miranda: “Hello Kitty, the Big Apple, the Penguin, the Joker and several other heroes, villains and pop culture icons appeared before the New York City Council on Wednesday to testify against a proposed bill that would regulate the ubiquitous and, occasionally, aggressive presence of costumed characters in Times Square.” [The New York Times]

Paddy Johnson was interviewed by Matthew Leifheit for VICE. “That’s the whole reason you go and see art—because someone has some way of visually expressing something in a way that you never would have thought of, or expressed that way yourself. Expression is the most powerful and interesting thing you can do with your life, I think.” [VICE]

Meredith Monk once composed music for Star Trek—and other little-known facts about the Monk. [The Lab]

A Nazi-era art collection has been bequeathed to the Kunstmuseum Bern, a small museum in Switzerland. The museum has to evaluate more than 1000 works of art to determine whether the works were acquired legally. [The New York Times]

On the fiftieth anniversary of the term gentrification, Curbed comes up with a quite revealing history of how word has come into use. To note: the New York Times use of “gentrification” dipped in the mid-1990s and skyrocketed in mid-2000s. [Curbed NY]

Yet another think piece decrying feminism. With the headline “Feminism Has Gone Too Far,” writer Lizzie Crocker has herself gone too far. She claims that feminists “certainfeminists to argue that certain subjects and certain arguments are either off limits or simply not up for debate,” referring to feminists protesting a pro-life abortion talk at Oxford given by two men. However, protesters themselves wrote that they were not aiming to stifle free speech.[The Daily Beast]

The Tate recruits the makers of Minecraft to transform two of its paintings into Minecraft. Downloads will be available on Monday. [BBC News]

Paul Chan wins the Guggenheim’s Hugo Boss Award. Winners of this prize tend to skew male; only three of the ten recipients have been women. [The Guggenheim]

AFC’s Panda Calendar—now on sale—makes national news! Critic Carolina Miranda of the LA Times explains why we’ve asked twelve artists to strip down while wearing panda hats, in a classical setting. She says we’ve transformed the “perfect trifecta of absurdity into a handy tool the art world can use all year long”. I’ll round that up to a two thumbs up! [The LA Times]

We got write ups in Paper (#breaktheinternet) and Artnet broke the news. Woot!

May the Lord have mercy on our souls: SantaCon, the all-day bar-crawl of drunken Santas, is moving its masses to Brooklyn. [ANIMAL New York]

In the most constructed form of fun we can think of, the Guggenheim tries to replicate disco, which was never cool to begin with. [Vulture]

A Metafilter post on Japanese “snow monkeys” is very informative, but the comment thread is just as good. “Japanese monkeys are assholes.” [Metafilter]

A history of vibrators, in graphic comics. The vibrator “was the fifth appliance to be electrified” and, in the early days, “[a]ds often featured beautiful women applying the vibrator to their faces.” [Oh Joy Sex Toy, via @edyoung209]

An obituary of photographer Lucien Clergue, documenter of gypsies, and Picasso, by his friend Joseph Nechvatal. [Hyperallergic]

The Ohio State Marching Band performs tributes to sci-fi films. Visually the band resembles ASCII Star Wars, but with references to every instance of sci fi in culture represented by tubas, trumpets, cannons, and fireworks. This is the kind of discipline and spirit I like to see representing America. [Laughing Squid]

On this week’s episode of Hello Kitty Cribs, watch a middle-age interior designer give a tour of his multi-room Hello Kitty shrine. [BBC]

“The abiding cliché of online sociality holds that one’s identity online is made up not of character traits…but of one’s likes and dislikes and the friends and acquaintances one is connected to.” Melissa Gronlund on how Rosalind Krauss’s theory of video art and narcissism stacks up with today’s Internet-inspired video. [Afterall]

London report: after a week-long protest in front of Parliament Square this past October, Occupy protesters are set to return in late November. For that next iteration, they’ve set up an open call for artwork. [Samia Gallery]

If you’re living in London, or anywhere else in Europe for that matter, expect heightened security checks at airports. Starting today. Fun! [The Washington Post]

“We’re pooping all wrong. And the toilets are to blame.” On the poor design of toilets. [Pacific Standard]

N00dies of us all over the internet this weekend. It has to do with art criticism. We’ll explain later. [Facebook]

Now there are lasers to shoot down drones. Where does it end? [The Verge]

For the journos: New York Magazine’s Vulture is looking for a senior editor. 2+ years experience editing online, and a deep love of television are required. [Mediabistro via Gabrielle Gantz on Twitter]

OH COME ON, ARTNET. These misleading titles, like the latest “Duane Michaels Shot Warhol, and Took Off,” are getting ridiculous. Click through to read a blurb about two fairly banal snapshots. [artnet News]

Chicago’s art paper Newcity made its own power list again, because fuuuckk youuu Artinfo. Here are the artists’ artists. [Newcity]

Jennifer Rubell is making food for the Performa benefit. This year Performa is honoring every rich woman under the sun. [In the Air]

The People’s Climate March preparations have started. They are expecting 100,000 people to show up this Sunday for the event. [The New York Times]

In further evidence, Environmentalist Bill McKibben is tweeting about 20 busloads of people headed to New York for the march already booked from Vermont. That seems like it would cover UVM and Middlebury alone. More! [Twitter]

The New Yorker does a video feature on the history of the Vocoder, a speech distortion tool popularized by Laurie Anderson and Kraftwerk, but was apparently invented as a top-secret military voice encoder. There is such thing as a “Vocoder historian”. [The New Yorker]

Philadelphia-based video artists: SUBMIT. The ICA has assembled a great jury for its open call video show, including Dirty Looks assistant director Karl McCool, PMA Associate Curator Erica Battle, and artist Beth Heinly, whom we featured in a Philly round-up last month. Based on McCool and Heinly in particular, we suspect this means creative risk taking and fearlessness will be rewarded. Submit to this. [ICA]

Artist-activists should apply right now to the Rauschenberg Foundation’s “Artist as Activist” program. They’re giving away piles and piles of money to artists committed to working with the public. Applications are due October 13th. Following grants will be awarded to help combat climate change. [The Rauschenberg Foundation]

One Amazon-published pulp novelist writes that Amazon has enabled him to produce more than he ever would have through traditional publishers, and the same is true for crime novelists, fan fiction writers, and niche writers the world over. “It’s been the most enjoyable creative burst of my career, a gleeful hack’s sprint toward nowhere in particular,” Neal Pollack writes. [Slate]

More points for Amazon: back in May, the company joined a coalition of big companies in favor of net neutrality. Sign this net neutrality petition for this blog, and all blogs. [Battle for the Net]

Just announced: Hyperplace Harlem is a three day festival featuring media and visual artists, readings, performances, workshops, and discussions that runs from October 4-6. There should be lots of tech projects here; get your nerd on. [Hyperplace]

What do you even do with 71 paintings after they’re all reported stolen? [Artnet News]

Watch-nerds review the Apple Watch. The verdict? It will disrupt the low-end watch market. “It offers so much more functionality than other digitals it’s almost embarrassing.” Read the section on the straps. Rarely have I seen such fawning. And in the “not so great” section of the review a favorite heading: Market Leader in a Category No One Really Asked For. The question posed by the author in this part of the review is whether the Apple Watch is Google’s Glass? I can answer that one right away: No. Google Glass is for assholes. [Hodinkee]

Carolina Miranda talks to artist Lisa Anne Auerbach about her zines, paintings, knitting, and why cats show up in her work so much. [Culture: High & Low]

Like New York, Miami housing has also become a piggybank for the foreign rich. Is displacement potentially endless? Will every city turn into a giant empty condo? [vocativ]

Maybe not! Brooklyn’s median rent has decreased for the first time in 15 months. We’ll hold our excitement, though, since we heard similars about Manhattan last year, and little has come of those. [Curbed]

The Camera Club of New York has been around since 1884. They’re moving to 126 Baxter Street in Chinatown. [Bowery Boogie]

“Sharks are like swimming noses,” says Danielle Dixon, an assistant professor in the School of Biology at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. Shark noses suffer when carbon levels rise. Sharks will die. [Treehugger]

Because there’s no art news today: This year, the cops reign in the open-air drug market at the Gathering of the Juggalos, just a little bit. [Village Voice]

Rhizome is giving away money to artists (again)! If you apply for a $500 Internet Art Microgrant, all you need to do is submit a 150-word proposal and a sketch, even a doodle, of your project. [Rhizome]

Rhizome continues its series of artist interviews, this time featuring Genevieve Belleveau. These are extensive. [Rhizome]

Will daily newspaper publishing soon be relegated only to giants like New York Times? David Boardman, ex-executive editor of the Seattle Times, hopes so. He thinks newspapers should publish only once a week, making for “superb, in-depth, last-all-week Sunday (or better yet, Saturday) paper, a publication so big and rich and engaging that readers will devour it piece by piece over many days, and pay a good price for that pleasure.” People should make magazines. [Slog]

Hauser Wirth + Schimmel, the Sterling Cooper Draper Price of the art world, descends upon LA with a 100,000 square foot building in a gut renovated former flour factory. Is the art world shifting its center? [Artnet]

We’ll be following Carolina Miranda’s new culture blog at the LA Times for the answer. [LA Times]

The above Mad Men comparison was ripped off from Christian Viveros-Fauné’s review of Lucien Smith, whose show he believes smacks of calculated career moves. As usual, there’s no shortage of quotables, but here’s a line that made me laugh so hard I snorted tea out of my nose: “Smith, along with a singularly opportunistic generation of twenty- and thirtysomethings — call them the Opportunists — produce paintings tailor-made for the market.” [Village Voice]

“The worst cases require the worst tools,” says Dragan Espenschied, Rhizome’s digital archivist, when referring to the problem of preserving art criticism on Facebook. Espenschied has come up with a way to archive your actions in a browser which requires an individual to access Facebook through a proxy server that would record data from their interactions. As Tom Moody brought up in the comment thread to this post, it doesn’t solve the problem of privacy settings, which affect what a user sees, but Kaplan says Rhizome is working on it. [Rhizome]

Salvador Dali wrote a cookbook! The book costs $350 on Amazon, but Brainpickings has published a few of the recipes, such as Conger Eel and “Thousand Year Old Eggs”. This of course comes with grotesquely exaggerated faces and self cannibalizing food. [Brainpickings]

Jorge Daniel Veneciano took over as director at El Museo del Barrio in March, and in the three months he’s been there he’s closed the half million dollar budget deficit that had plagued the museum. Now to avoid the dull drums. Holland Cotter discusses the new programming noting that it’s a solid but conservative lineup. [The New York Times]

The Michigan Legislature has approved $195 million in aid for Detroit pensioners and long-term oversight of city finances. This will help protect the Detroit Institute of Art from having its art work seized and sold. [Detroit News]

The New York Times editorial board guardedly says it’s time for the FTC to keep an eye on Amazon. Amazon’s battle with Hachette Book Group wound up with the online giant refusing to sell Hachette books. At best that’s bullying, but it looks a heck of a lot closer to antitrust. [The New York Times]

If you also smell smoke in Brooklyn, it’s from a “mysterious fire,” a forest fire, that’s taking over a New Jersey park. [The L Magazine]

Thanks to Marina Galperina and Carolina Miranda, more Fuck Room details have emerged! Galperina’s found Mike Kelley’s own description of his hidden “crawl space/fuck room,” from the book Mike Kelley: Minor Histories. It is real. [ANIMAL New York]

“The post-internet art object looks good online in the way that laundry detergent looks good in a commercial.” Brian Droitcour continues to make observations on “post-internet art.” [Culture Two]

Bridget Riley, 82, has designed a colorful mural for St. Mary’s Hospital in London. [The Guardian]

Former Gawker writer Emily Gould writes about all the debt she incurred while writing her first book. It’s brave in its honesty, so you want to like Gould, but the story itself makes that incredibly difficult. [The Medium]

According to Scott Stringer, 20 percent of New York City public schools have no art teachers, even though arts instruction is required by law for middle and high schools. [New York Times]

Roberta Smith has seen the show of George W. Bush’s paintings. “[H]e has painted a world of smiles and friendship that can rarely be taken as the whole story,” she writes, and predicts that because of the conflicted mix of skill and historical whitewashing, they’re not going away. Oh well. [New York Times]

S&P’s Global Luxury Index tells us what those of us in the art world already know. Rich people are spending their money on luxury goods. Great to see all that money trickling down to those who need it. [Business Insider]

“[Social practice art] is a reaction against the excesses of individualism,” Tom Finkelpearl, director of the Queens Museum, and now Cultural Commissioner for the city of New York tells Carolina Miranda. Furthering that definition, artist and author Pablo Helguera says the art form is “about how to listen”. [Artnews]

When it’s cold outside and the G train is fucked, take comfort in the fact that the old animated Deitch Projects website is still up and running. [Deitch Projects]

If the next generation of superrich is coming from Silicon Valley, then art needs to be there. This week, the new Silicon Valley Contemporary (SVC) Fair will be sending out some Chelsea and the Lower East Side’s biggest galleries. Because, in the words of Hamptons Expo Group President Rick Friedman, “You can only buy so many Teslas.” [Artnet News]